Thursday, April 26, 2007

ANN CURRY: Do you know the American people are suffering… watching [Iraq]? LAURA BUSH: Oh, I know that very much, and, believe me, no suffers more than their president and I do when we watch this. And certainly the commander-in-chief who has asked our military to go into harm’s way. AC: What do you think the American people need to know… LB: Well, I hope they do know the burden of worry that’s on his shoulders every single day for our troops. And I think they do. I think if they don’t, they’re not seeing what the real responsibilities of our president are. AC: It must be hard for you to watch him in this. LB: It’s hard. Of course, it’s absolutely hard.

Why gee I believe there is something in there that bears repeating. “Believe me, no suffers more than their president and I do when we watch this”. OK let me see if I can calm down enough to write something mildly coherent.

Laura Bush dares compare her suffering to that off all the soldiers who have come back with missing limbs, eyes and skull. Laura Bush dares to say her and her husband are suffering worse than the mother or wife of a dead soldier. She seems to think that they are the burdened ones. The president who has taken more vacation than any other in history is horribly burdened by this war. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t want to invite Cindy Sheehan in for coffee. He has a guilty conscience. Though I kind of tend to doubt that. If he had a conscience he would have been institutionalized after all the suffering he allowed to go on in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

It’s not a matter of conscience it’s an utter lack of context. Let’s face facts. The Bush family hasn’t missed a lot of meals or paychecks or had creditors knocking on their door or buried a lot of their young because the hospital refused them. I would guess the Bush family’s definition of suffering is a might bit different than other people’s. Remember after Hurricane Katrina hit and all those people have to go sleep in the Astrodome and Barbara Bush, the president’s mom said this stupid spiteful thing? “Almost everyone I've talked to says, “We're gonna move to Houston.' What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas... Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality, and so many of the people in the arenas here, you know, were underprivileged anyway. This is working very well for them.” [Source] You see kids the Bush family doesn’t seem to have a really good handle on this whole suffering thing. To them suffering means only one type of bottle water available at the tennis court or getting to the restaurant too late to get the risotto. It would seem that somewhere in Laura’s mind she really is suffering worse than anyone. She’s too insulated to realize anything else. Living in the White House and being the governor of Texas’ wife and having a husband that went from being addicted to nose candy and hooch to being addicted to Jesus can’t leave one terribly grounded in the reality the other 300 million Americans endure.

So Laura either needs to live the life of a single mom trying to raise three kids or the reality of a young wife carrying for her husband who is now a brain damaged veteran of the Iraq War or she simply needs to get better handlers to tell her what to say. I doubt she would do the first two.